The Mandela Effect, and Memory

A new internet meme, related to confabulation, is known as the Mandela Effect. This is a situation where a number of people have memories that are different from available evidence. The term was coined by Fiona Broome, who says she, and other people, remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s, rather than in 2013.

She argues that common memories which appear mistaken could be explained by the existence of parallel universes that are able to interact with each other. A common thread of discussion regarding this “effect” is misremembering the Berenstain Bears being spelled as, “Berenstein Bears.”

The “Mandela Effect” is named after South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela, who became a topic of interest in the year 2010 by people noticing with surprise that he was alive at that time–since many people remembered him having died while incarcerated.

Observations of dead people alive again are just one of many types of Mandela Effects, with other notable examples including changes to song lyrics, movie dialogue, movie scenes, physical geography, physiological anatomy, and product names.

The Mandela Effect is one of those things most people won’t believe in until it happens to them. Like falling in love or going through heartbreak, the Mandela Effect is something you have to experience in order to fully embrace.

And even then, it often takes more than one or two experiences to break through the resistance most of us have to accepting the existence of something that fundamentally challenges our unspoken foundational assumption that facts and historical events don’t change.

When we encounter something indicating evidence that in fact, history has changed–it feels shocking to discover some of the lines have been canceled and washed out! We seem to be approaching ‘tipping point’ where it’s getting harder for scoffers to say there’s no such thing as the Mandela Effect / reality shifts / alternate histories.

Some scoffers have leapt to the conclusion that Mandela Effect experiencers who are noticing long- familiar words in movies, TV shows, books, and products are most likely suddenly sharing ‘false memories,’ due to the fact that human memories are not fully reliable.

When we consider the matter of “confabulation” and “false recollections” at this dawning of the new Quantum Age, we see that we may eventually call such things “alternate recollections,” in recognition of awareness of the fact that we know that each and every one of us exists in a superimposed state, with access to many possible alternate histories, presents, and futures.

The idea that the many worlds of quantum physics might be one and the same as the multiverse has been proposed by such esteemed physicists as Dr Yasunori Nomura and Dr Raphael Bousso of UC Berkeley, and increasing numbers of scientists are feeling optimistic that we might yet find evidence that we indeed live in a multiverse.